The Legacy of Dr. Marni Sheppeard

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Dr. Marni Sheppeard passed away during a hiking trip in New Zealand in early 2021. She was a category theorist with interests in theoretical physics, including the standard model and quantum gravity. Her thesis in 2007 introduced the notion of associahedra and operads being applied to scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory. By 2012, similar notions became popular through the coining of the term amplituhedron. This video briefly provides an overview of Marni’s life work by Quantum Gravity Research physicist David Chester and concludes by synthesizing how concepts in her thesis have been recapitulated in works from 2013 and 2017. The relationship of associahedra to QCD comes through the quark color charge sector, while the spin-1 kinematic sector of the gluons is deformed from the spin-0 kinematic associahedron of the biadjoint scalar theory. These later works are compatible with the claims laid out in Marni’s thesis.

Marni’s blog: https://arcadiangravity.typepad.com/

Marni’s thesis mentioning associahedra and operads in relation to Yang-Mills scattering amplitudes (2007): https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/1436

Marni’s viXra page: https://vixra.org/author/m_d_sheppeard

Use of Dyck words in Yang-Mills theory (2013): https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.7809

Relationship of biadjoint scalar theory to Yang-Mills theory (2013): https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.0885

Use of associahedra in biadjoint scalar theory (2017): https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08527, https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.09102

Correction: The video incorrectly states that Marni passed away in Australia, but she actually passed in New Zealand. We apologize for the mistake.

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Written by Quantum Gravity Research